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Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church |
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Jack Canfield writes in A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul: “David, my next-door neighbor, has two young kids ages five and seven. One day he was teaching his seven-year-old son Kelly how to push the gas-powered lawn mower around the yard. As he was teaching him how to turn the mower around at the end of the lawn, his wife, Jan, called to ask a question. As David turned to answer the question, Kelly pushed the lawn mower right through the flower bed at the edge of the lawn - leaving a two-foot wide path leveled to the ground.! When David turned back around and saw what had happened, he began to lose control. David had put a lot of time and effort into making those flower beds the envy of the neighborhood. As he began to raise his voice to his son, Jan walked quickly over to him, put her hand on his shoulder and said, “David, please remember, we’re raising children, not flowers!” On this Mother’s Day we celebrate parents who have their family priorities figured out - including the fact that you are here today. You have learned the secret of Psalm 122 and are teaching it to your children. Psalm 122 is the psalm of worship. It is an example of what people of faith do -- gather to an assigned place and worship their God. The first line catches many people by surprise. “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” But it shouldn’t. Worship is the most popular thing that Christians do. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to. Now there are, to be sure, a few temporary coercions -- children and even spouses who attend church because another decided that they must -- or who desire to keep peace in the home, especially on Mother’s Day. But these coercions are short-lived, - a few years at most. Most Christian worship is voluntary. An excellent way to test our true values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything -- how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our discretionary money. The test results for worship are impressive. There are more people at worship on any given Sunday than are at all the football games or on the golf links or fishing or taking walks in the woods. Worship is the single most popular voluntary act in the country. Why do we do it? Why is there so much voluntary and faithful worship? The Psalm singles out three items which were true for ancient Israel and which are true for us today. First, we are told that worship gives us, and our children, a workable structure for life. The psalm says, “Jerusalem, built as a city which is bound firmly together, to which the tribes go up , the tribes of the Lord.” Jerusalem, for a Jew was the place of worship. When you went to Jerusalem, you encountered the great basics: God created you, God redeems you, God provides for you. In Jerusalem the Jewish believer saw in ritual and heard proclaimed in preaching the powerful truth that God forgives our sins and makes it possible to live without guilt and with purpose. In Jerusalem all the scattered fragments of humans experience were put together in a single whole. In Jerusalem worship all the different tribes came together as a single people. In much the same way, we come this morning from different places. But we are after the same things, saying the same things, doing the same things. With all our differing levels of intelligence and wealth, background and race - in worship we are gathered as one people - the people of the Lord. That’s the idea. But how does it live? If your house is like many others, it almost seems that there is a satanic opposition that would keep us fro getting to worship at all - or - if we make it, to keep us from showing up in the right frame of mind. It can be hard to come into the Lord’s house with gladness and thanksgiving ten minutes after getting the children ready. In one cartoon a woman says to her husband, “Let’s switch roles today. You get the kids dressed and I’ll sit outside and honk the horn.” I am going to use a longer quote this morning. But one particular mother named Nancy Parsons says it so well. She writes: &#There is nothing glamorous about Sunday morning in our house. The living room is smeared with half- read Sunday papers, the kitchen is cluttered with half-empty cereal bowls, and I often feel a tinge of envy toward my unchurched neighbors. &#Theirs is a Sunday morning of leisurely coffee and the editorial page. Most of my neighbors are non-churchgoing. It is easier to be that. Why, then, is our family different? &#For one thing, my husband and I both grew up in church-going families...So, church-going is a habit, 𠇋rought to our adulthood and our shared life. A habit, yes. But that word can’t bear the responsibility for our present church attendance. We could easily exchange the church-going habit for Sunday morning self-indulgence. &#We go to church so we won’t feel guilty? Hardly. We aren’t paying off a heavy conscience. What we feel when we don’t go is an absence. &#Our church is a cross-section of people all mixed together and functioning as a community. But if we valued just the sense of community, a country club or Kiwanis might adequately serve us. But we view the church - at least most of the time - as an example of functioning Christianity whose values we affirm. My husband and I expect the church to reinforce what we try to teach and live at home.” Parsons writes: “Sometimes, in the Fellowship Hall after a service, I will catch sight of a child running, giggling, set free finally from his church-school class, and it will seem just last month that the child was an infant and I was promising to share in the child’s Christian upbringing. &#I observe the youngster’s happiness with pleasure and am moved to remember the times my husband and I stood at the baptismal and heard at our backs the congregation affirming their responsibility for our children. &#We moved recently, and in a new state, in a new town, have started to find our way into another church family. We miss our old one - familiar faces and friends with whom our lives were involved. &#After the service, some people stop to grip our hands, ask our names, and offer theirs. Strange faces and names blur, but that doesn’t matter. The important thing is we are being made welcome. Even in a new place, we have a sense of being home.” The second reason the psalm holds up for why Christians keep returning to worship is that worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God. Worship is the place where we obey the command to praise God: “ As was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord.” This command runs tight down the center of all Christian worship. A decree. A word telling us what we ought to do; and what we ought to do is praise. When we praise, we function at the center. We are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being. But sometimes we don’t feel like it, and so we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to worship and praise God when I don’t feel it. I would be a hypocrite.” But the psalm says, “I don’t care whether you feel it or not: as was decreed, ‘Give thanks to the name of the Lord.’” Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But get this -- this does not mean we always worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians only worshiped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas, but often unreliable in matters of faith. We live in what one writer has called the “Age of Sensation”. We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different -- that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much more quickly than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God which is expressed in an act of worship. John White writes: “The first thing you must learn is that God wants fellowship with you and He is drawing you to Himself. He is pursuing you. He is waiting to entrap you into an encounter with Himself. He does not do so because He needs you, but because you need Him. His is the tenderness of a mother over a fretful infant. To worship is to enter into the tabernacle where He waits and let Him speak with you. For He is there. And He is speaking.” That is the pure motivation for worship - not a grim sense of duty, but expecting God to meet us and to tenter into relationship with us. That is what worship is all about. It is not based on obligation even though it is an obligation. It is not based on the fact that it works and is practical - even though that’s true. Worship is made glorious when we realize that it is a personal audience for you and for me with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. The third reason we engage in regular worship is that in worship our attention is centered on the Word of God. Our psalm describes worship as the place where “thrones for judgment were set, the thrones of the House of David.” The biblical word, “judgement”, means “the decisive word by which God straightens things out and puts things right.” We are not tourists. We are disciples. Disciple means we are people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ. A disciple is a learner - not in the academic setting of a school room, but at the work site of a craftsman. God wants to show Himself to you. God wants you to reflect His own nature. And it is very presumptuous for us to think that that can happen on an occasional basis. The first key to good worship is to attend worship on a regular basis. You cannot possibly understand any depth of what God’s Word is trying to communicate unless there is continuity. It takes more than a casual attendance to become familiar enough with the service to allow that service to be a vehicle to lead you into a deeper experience of worship for you and your children. One humorist wrote: “I grew up in a very religious household. My dad dabbled in religion like most men dabble in sports. Its tough growing up Mormon Southern Baptist reincarnationist. You can’t drink, smoke or dance. And then, you get to do it all over again. I never understood why my dad kept switching churches. I thought we were in some kind of religious witness protection program.” Now that’s a funny image, but it’s not a funny reality. Our children, like us, need to be in a place long enough to put down supportive roots. And that doesn’t happen overnight. I firmly believe one of the best things we can do for our children is to encourage them to develop strong Christian friendships early in their lives through Sunday School and Youth Groups, so that close friendships become a way of life later on. We have great Sunday School program here. I can’t imagine better or more creative leadership. But I do have a concern that attendance is sometimes sporadic. Our average children’s church school attendance is only about half of enrollment. That’s a lot better than at some churches. But sporadic participation is not enough to allow our children to develop the spiritual, intellectual and relational roots they so badly need. Some years ago I read an article about actress Melanie Griffith and her marriage to Don Johnson. Among other things, Griffith talked about the religious nurture of her children. She said, “I know we ought to go to church. I lie in bed on Sunday morning and think, ‘We ought to go to church today.’ But we don’t do it. And then, when we do take the children at Christmas and Easter, they don’t get the point anyway.” What a surprise - that Griffith’s children can’t grasp the creator of the universe in two hours a year. Entertainers do not need this, but no teacher that I know would condone sporadic attendance in a classroom and expect a student to grasp the subject. Attend a course in higher mathematics twice a year and see how much you learn - and God is much bigger, much deeper, much more complex than mathematics. The rule of thumb for the average pastor is that it take one hour of desk time for every minute that a pastor stands in the pulpit. But what about the person who quickly reads the funnies and the sports page before church, enters the service of worship in a rush and then seeks to deal with some of life’s most profound questions? It’s real hard to do. It’s hard to shift gears that quickly. We need to prepare ourselves in prayer before we come to worship if we hope to receive all that God wants us to receive. We so desperately need to receive. This week I was talking to some of the men in our church. They described some of the temptations and pressures they face out in the business community - pressures and temptations many of you know very well. And they shared how vital it is to step back, to go aside with God on Sunday morning, and get refocused. God wants to speak to you here, in this place. The word of God is everywhere in worship. In the call to worship, in the benediction, in the scripture lessons and in the sermon. The hymns are all to a greater or lesser extent paraphrases of scripture. Every time we worship our minds are focused and our memories refreshed with the word of God. We learn what God says, what He has decided, the ways He is working out our salvation. Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God, it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship, it deepens. It overflows the hour and touches our whole week. Our everyday needs are changed by worship. We no longer live from hand to mouth - scrambling through the rat race to make the best we can out of a bad situation. We discover instead the dignity of creatures made in the image of God. We hear what God says - what He says to us about our world and our place in it. Worship is the place where our lives are transformed by these personal and decisive words of God. Two women were talking about worship. One of them said, “I used to go to church, but I stopped when I realized that, over the years, I have heard hundreds of sermons - and that of all those sermons I can only really remember two or three of them.” Her friend said, “I know exactly what you mean. Over the years I have eaten a whole lot of meals - three a day. And, you know, I can only really remember a few of those meals. I can’t even remember what I ate last Sunday. But I still have the distinct impression that without those meals, I would have starved to death years ago.” |
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